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Lynn Ringenberg: Nuclear weapons still pose huge threat

The current negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program will hopefully make the world a little safer by keeping the nation from developing nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, there are no comparable negotiations to deal with the huge and far more dangerous arsenals of nuclear weapons that already exist.

Two decades after the end of the Cold War, more than 17,000 nuclear weapons remain in the world, a significant number of these on high-alert status capable of launching within 30 seconds to 3 minutes. These weapons are expensive yet are poorly suited to address modern military threats. The cataclysmic costs of a nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia has been extensively studied, but relatively little attention has been given to a more likely conflict between rival regional nuclear powers such as Pakistan and India, until now.

A new scientific report, “Nuclear Famine: Two Billion People at Risk?” — just released by Physicians for Social Responsibility — finds that a limited nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan involving just 100 Hiroshima-sized bombs, less than 0.5 percent of the nuclear weapons on Earth, would put 2.3 billion people at risk for starvation, cause a major decline in precipitation and cause a 10-percent decrease in corn and soybean production in the U.S. for a decade. Not to mention the more than 20 million people dead within a week from the explosions, firestorms and acute radiation exposure.

Scientists found that the firestorms generated by these nuclear explosions would put around 5 million tons of radioactive black soot high into the atmosphere. The soot would block sunlight, dropping surface temperatures across the planet.

This cooling effect would lower precipitation worldwide, with significant changes in precipitation patterns, and shorten the growing seasons in areas where much of the world’s grain is produced. China’s production of rice would fall 21 percent in the first four years, and wheat production would drop by a staggering 31 percent in a decade. The decline in available food would be exacerbated by increases in food prices that would make food inaccessible to hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest.

According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization report from 2012, there are 870 million people in the world today who are chronically malnourished, so even a 10-percent decline in food consumption would put this entire group at risk of not surviving.

Other important public health issues that need to be considered are the likelihood that famine on this scale would lead to major epidemics of infectious diseases such as typhus, cholera, dysentery, malaria and smallpox. The massive increase in UV-B light would clearly have negative impacts on public health and terrestrial ecosystems. There would be the potential for war and civil conflict, and almost certainly food riots, and increases in ethnic violence and armed conflicts, resulting in unimaginable traumatic injuries and death.

This report demonstrates the need for additional research and public discussion to highlight the urgent need to move forward to the negotiation of a global agreement to eliminate nuclear weapons and the dangers of nuclear war. As stakeholders in this country, we must let our political leaders know that we expect them to work tirelessly to eliminate nuclear weapons, not just in the U.S., but globally. We must prevent what cannot be cured — a nuclear event through a mistake, terrorism or war.